Iowa Keeps Creating: Digital Stage

Miss Christine | Stay Away

“The music video for my song ‘Stay Away’ is compiled of videos submitted to me from friends around the country. I wanted to find a way to bring us together in this isolated time. Edited by Fred Ebong, it brought healing to me and many others who have watched it. The Iowa City Press Citizen called it a pandemic artifact. I am happy that it has brought smiles to people's faces during this hard year. Through this music video, I used art to heal my longing for human interaction.”

Miss Christine: Confident, catchy, and queer.
Christine Moad, of Nichols, Iowa, had achieved the musician’s dream: Success as an internationally touring bassist and many side gigs back in Nashville. There was just one problem: They were unfulfilled. It took courage to leave it all behind. Having made the decision to leave Nashville and the hectic, cut-throat, session musician scene, Christine settled on a farm in their home state of Iowa and spent time exploring the inner workings of their mind. Stargazing in the flyover state beside their library of Beatles memorabilia, they crafted the foundations of their debut record Conversion. Indie rock, new wave, bluesy soul influences and more all find their home amongst a punky grit. Gender, personal strength, challenging relationships, and the current political climate in the United States, are just some of the subjects tackled in Conversion. Christine’s free spirit and positive attitude are sowing the seeds of self-acceptance for a new generation of women, men, and others.

Get Social: @misschristinemusic Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook

misschristinemusic.com | Virtual Tip Jar: Venmo: @Christine-Moad, PayPal: paypal.me/misschristinemusic

Lauren Haldeman | Seventeen Powers of Visitation

“In collaboration with the fantastic Iowa filmmaker Bruce James Bales, this video is a poetry film based on one of my poems about visiting the dead. Little did I know that just a short time later the entire world would be in the grips of grief and death, and that the skills I had learned about my own losses and grief would suddenly be so poignant. This film stars my daughter too, which has been a goal of my art-making after becoming a mom. We are wearing masks that I made after my brother died, making these masks (I ended up creating 15 of them) was part of my grief process. The poem and the film seem dark, strange, but the overall sentiment underneath it is that we are still connected to our lost loved ones and that there is peace, even joy. One line always surprises me, even though I wrote it! ‘It is fine; WE are fine.’ That came through the pen onto the page like a voice from afar. And I trust it.”

Lauren Haldeman, of Iowa City, is the author of Instead of Dying (winner of the 2017 Colorado Prize for Poetry), Calenday, and The Eccentricity is Zero. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Tin House, The Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, Fence and others. A graphic novelist and poet, she’s received an Iowa Arts Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award and visiting artist fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and University of Cape Town, South Africa. She is currently creating daily comics from quarantine, which you can find on her Instagram, linked below.

Get Social: Instagram: @laurenhaldeman
laurenhaldeman.com & laurenhaldeman.threadless.com | Virtual Tip Jar: Venmo: @LaurenHaldeman, PayPal: paypal.me/LaurenHaldeman

Michelle Marie | Field

"‘Field’ is a piece made in response to the prompt, ‘As communication continues to shift and be normalized in often vastly uncomfortable ways during Covid-19, we search for alternatives. As one possible means of recourse, we have turned to an old parapsychological staple: E.S.P. -- perceiving information through the mind alone!’ This call, from Flatland, asked us to participate in a remote telepathy test and submit works based upon the results. This work plays with methods of digital communication, taking digital in the literal and physical sense, using both technology and my own fingers to create an occasion for movement exploration. Composed of gestures from my ESP test, techniques of EMDR and Effleurage, this dance taps into the psychic potentials of the body as a method of communicating with the self, with the other, and with one another.”

Michelle Marie is a dancer, performer, movement researcher and instructor based in Norwalk, Iowa. She received her modern dance training at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she developed her contact improvisation and deep listening practices under Kirstie Simson and Jason Finkelman.  She has performed in works by Meredith Monk, Mark Morris, and most recently Pauline Oliveros' The Lunar Opera; Deep Listening For_Tunes, which is archived in the Library of Congress. Recent exhibitions include The Old Future's Almanac and ESP USA for Flatland Chicago. She can be seen dancing in Amenda Tate's upcoming experimental film, Sapient 2.021. Her ongoing research and practices can be found at her Instagram handles below.

Get Social: Instagram: @oneseconddances, @ohmichelleyeah
Virtual Tip Jar: Venmo: @mmvk11, PayPal: mmvkenny@gmail.com

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